Solana outage was caused by infinite loop bug previously seen on devnet

Solana Labs said that the caller outage that halted blockchain transactions for 5 hours connected Feb. 6 was caused by a bug developers caught a week earlier.

Solana Labs published a elaborate study connected Feb. 9 outlining its probe of the outage, which revealed that the known bug had aggregate triggers, and developers had lone deployed a hole for 1 of them erstwhile the outage occurred.

Root cause

Though earlier reports partially identified the issue, the latest study provides a method crushed for the outage and states that a “deploy-evict-request rhythm of a bequest loader programme triggered an infinite recompile loop successful the JIT cache.”

Simply put, Solana’s transaction process entered an infinite loop owed to a bug.

The applicable bug lone affected mentation 1.17 of Solana’s validator lawsuit and was not contiguous successful mentation 1.16 of the client. However, astir each validators stalled due to the fact that 95% of the clump involvement was moving 1.17 astatine the clip of the affected block.

The latest study besides reveals that developers had identified the bug arsenic the origin of an outage connected Solana’s devnet 1 week earlier. Developers had already patched 1 imaginable trigger for the bug erstwhile the outage occurred and subsequently sped the merchandise of a spot for the 2nd trigger.

The hole is successful mentation 1.17.20 of the client; developers mean to merchandise a much implicit hole successful the future, according to the report.

Solana has experienced galore outages

Solana has regularly attracted contention for its outages, which occurred often successful its earlier days.

According to information from CryptoManiaks, Solana has experienced nine outages since September 2021, with implicit 150 hours of downtime — excluding the latest outage this week.

Until the latest incident, the web did not person an outage for astir 1 year. Its erstwhile outage occurred successful February 2023 and lasted 18 hours.

Solana (SOL) prices person much than recovered since the astir caller Feb. 6 incident, which caused SOL to deed a six-day debased of $93.75. The token was trading astatine $105.46 arsenic of property time, up 2.4% implicit the past 24 hours.

Editor’s Note: Although Solana Labs confirmed the details of the outage connected its ain website, the study was primitively authored and published by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington — a erstwhile technologist astatine Solana Labs.

The station Solana outage was caused by infinite loop bug antecedently seen connected devnet appeared archetypal connected CryptoSlate.